


If On A Clear Day

by Arien



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/M, Found Poetry, Housemates, Mutually Unrequited, Roommates, Sexual Tension, Sleeping Together, it's not about the tardis amy, just friends?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-22
Updated: 2017-10-14
Packaged: 2018-08-16 15:47:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 16,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8108239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arien/pseuds/Arien
Summary: When the TARDIS mysteriously vanishes, the Doctor and Amy Pond are left stranded on a futuristic human colony. This is a story of how life must go on - or perhaps for the Doctor, begin - while awaiting the return of a beautiful blue box. When I awoke today suddenly nothing happenedBut in my dreams I slew the dragonAnd down this beaten pathAnd up this cobbled laneI'm walking in my own footsteps once again.





	1. Any

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to explore the idea of the Doctor and Amy living together, and then had to invent a story to support that. Yikes.
> 
> Lyrics credit to Colin Hay.

Waking to clutter all over the house was not what Amy Pond signed up for. It was everywhere and perhaps it might have been somewhat tolerable were it actually _for_ something. Unfortunately, this was just another one of the Doctor’s rubbish “projects” that excited him for a few minutes or hours or occasionally days until he dismissed it as rubbish and started on something else.

Standing in her nightie, Amy surveyed the scene. Their kitchen wasn’t much – a little block of space separated from the living area by a long bench. It had a unit full of the kind of gadgets which she had first thought were pretty cool (that one not only baked the cake, but iced it, too!) but now made her roll her eyes, because humankind’s foray into the stars consisted of petty advancements like automatic cake machines but they were still lugging around the same old, age-old, baggage they had foisted on her generation … which was what, about four hundred years ago now?

She closed her eyes tightly as if, when reopening them, everything would go away. While unsurprised, she managed to still be bitterly disappointed to find everything was precisely as she saw it last. Well, not exactly. It might have grown worse.

The sink was rendered useless because a long, ribbed pipe was taped to the nozzle and linked up to a colander. Each hole in the metal instrument was then linked up to tiny blue or purple cables, which in turn twisted in inventive patterns to connect to other items – among them, a few empty but unwashed tins of beans, a pair of reflective glasses and an ancient VHS player. That bloody VHS player! The Doctor was obsessed with it. Every time she happened upon another invention of his that VHS player emerged and was connected to something else in some other way. Was it ever used to actually play tapes? Oh no! And when Amy had actually found an original copy of Disney’s _Alice in Wonderland_ on VHS in the back of a twelfth-hand shop while searching for a pair of stainless-steel coat hooks that were exactly the right size and shape the Doctor needed and dare _suggest_ they use the VHS player as a VHS player and watch a _video_ , the Doctor had the nerve to look faintly offended and told her it was too ‘delicate’ for that.

It was around that time Amy stopped helping him source crap for his inventions.

Amongst the prototype occupying the kitchen was also their automatic vacuum unit, newly disassembled, along with a really nice belt she’d found a few days ago. Amy gave a cry and bent down to pick it up. It was faintly slimy and all the metal had been picked off it. She threw it back down and kicked a few bits of junk out of the way on her way to the refrigeration unit. As expected, the Doctor had eaten a little and a lot of everything and there was nothing for her.

Enough was enough.

Amy didn’t expect a tidy housemate. She knew he was vague and incapable of that. She didn’t care that she had to pick her way around rubbish that he toyed with and promptly forgot about; she anticipated this. But constantly finding the kitchen an atrocity or the bathroom a crime scene every morning was just too much for her. 

She banged hard on the bathroom door. “Doctor! Doctor!”

“Just be a minute, Pond!” He sang out above the sound of the water and the steam. “Just got to finish up by fingers, covered in mucky stuff.”

Oh no. She knew how long he could spend in there. He could lose hours! Amy marched into his bedroom, banged open the door, and swung her arm around the side. His coat hung from a peg. She reached into his inside pocket and withdrew a yo-yo, a piece of fruitcake and a reddish-gold rock before finding the sonic.

“Point and think,” she said aloud with almost frightening calm and determination. The door lock sprang open and Amy thrust open the door.

The Doctor saw her right away. And she saw _him_ , and as she did every other time she burst in unannounced she made sure she enjoyed a good, hard look at his full nakedness. It was worth it every time. He was built exactly like a human man, at least on the outside, and a very well-proportioned human man at that. The first few times she had honed all attention purely on what hung between his legs, but now she preferred to soak up those other little details. She soft trail of hair between his groin and navel, the exact shape of his buttocks, the path the droplets of water took from torso to toes … all these things, and more, she willed to memory. 

For his part, the Doctor cared nothing for nudity. He never seemed to care that she had seen him undressed, only that she had interrupted him and intended to distract with questions or demands. When she commented on his apparent lack of propriety, he just made that face he made when he grouped her in with the dullest of humanity. Naked bodies held no interest for him, so he said. And yet Amy noticed he never managed to walk in on her when she was indecent … even when she left the door wide open. No, he lurked outside and knocked.

And so it was that many of their conversations seemed to be had with the him nude. Amy would never, ever, tire of that.

“ _Showering,_ Pond.” The Doctor scrubbed his fingers with a small red brush. He shot her a disapproving glance from underneath wet locks of flopping brown hair. “We’ve had this conversation.”

Amy crossed her arms and pursed her lips. She gestured with her eyes toward the rest of the house, toward the kitchen. The penny would drop, sooner or later.

It did. The Doctor went back to his fingernails, obviously counting on her going away even though she never did without saying her piece. So he tried to give it some thought, what might’ve bothered Amelia today? Then he looked up, brush stalling. “Ah. Kitchen. Yes.” He quickly pushed back his hair. “Sorry, Pond.”

“Sorry?! I have to be at work in ten minutes and now I’m gonna have to buy a coffee on the way, and my lunch later, because you ate through everything again. I even bought things you said you didn’t like so you wouldn’t be tempted!”

“What things?”

“The Mycejian spread!”

“Is that the speckled orange stuff?”

“Yes!”

“Oh I quite liked this. Good with chicken.”

“Good with - ?!” Oh, it didn’t matter. She shook her head quickly and rolled her eyes. “Whatever! Point is, you live here with me now. You don’t live on a magical spaceship that cleans up after you or has infinite space to muck up. And if you’re gonna eat things, you should leave me something or at least do a spot of shopping _once_ in awhile!”

He looked deeply hurt. “I shop!”

“You brought back five bags of limoncello ice cream!”

That got a little smile out of him. A guilty smile, but ultimately one which regretted nothing. “…good stuff.”

“You were sick everywhere,” Amy pointed out. She was never going to forget the exact shade of yellow he brought up… Even so, that memory, and the Doctor’s admission, softened her. “Just … think, a bit more, thanks.”

“Yes Pond. Of course, Pond. And, ah, Amelia..?”

“…yeah?”

“Eyes forward.”

The gentle prompting took a moment to sink in. Then Amy coughed softly, looking up from where she had been gazing at a fat, lazy stream of water snaking its way down his thigh. She snapped her gaze to his and gave him an unrepentant smirk, then turned on her heel to allow him to enjoy the rest of his shower in peace.

Amy spent the next few minutes hurrying around the flat, trying to gather up her things. For all her criticisms of the Doctor’s habits she really couldn’t talk – she wasn’t the neatest of people, either, but at least her junk was somewhere in the normal spectrum. 

Three months ago, a virus entered the TARDIS’ console. The Doctor still hadn’t really explained how it had gotten there and she was pretty sure ‘virus’ was just a dumbed-down word to give her some idea of what had happened, and the real cause had nothing to do with a virus at all. The result was that the TARDIS dematerialised before their eyes and, according to the Doctor, it wouldn’t be back for what equated to almost a full year on this planet. It had taken Amy a little while to get that information out of him. Losing the TARDIS had rendered him speechless and disconsolate for a long time.

So there they were. Marooned on Kepler-62f, one of the more successful human colonies, flung far into her personal timeline’s future. As far as marooning went it wasn’t so bad: they had the sonic and the psychic paper and were able to pass themselves off as legitimate citizens. When they could not precisely know when the TARDIS would return, the Doctor didn’t want to risk going too far. So they established themselves in Gypsum, and Amy got a job to pass the time and the Doctor …

The Doctor was impossible.

Realistically, Amy knew his very nature dictated this kind of restlessness. He mentioned to her that, during his Third regeneration, he’d been bound to Earth and he seemed to have occupied himself well enough then with UNIT. He hadn’t sought out such an organisation on Kepsix (as the locals liked to abbreviate it). Instead, his mandate seemed to be to drive her crazy in as many ways possible. Ways which included junk experiments that went nowhere, and the tendency to hold conversations completely naked…

Amy pulled on her brown aviator jacket and touched the frame by the front door. It had only been three months since they saw Vincent, but now, he’d been dead hundreds and hundreds of years. His work had not been forgotten. She tenderly straightened the print – a vase of sunflowers, with the tiny words inked nearby, just for her. Maybe they could go back and see him again right after the TARDIS came back and show him just how long-lived his works would be. They had even been moved off-world, so colonists galaxy-wide would be able to appreciate them. First masterpiece in space. She thought he’d like that.

In the bathroom, the Doctor had begun to sing. That was her cue to go. Amy widened her eyes in exasperation and wondered again how such a thing could have possibly happened, and sent a quick prayer to the universe that the TARDIS might come back to them soon. 

A year was a very long time to share a flat with a madman in a box.


	2. Minute

Navigating Kepsix was initially confusing. It was so vast and so congested that Amy wondered if she would ever get the hang of it. And then she realised that despite its size it was actually quite simple, as it had been designed to prevent even lobotomised morons from losing their way.

Kepsix was organised into Megablocks. These were vast, super starscrapers. They housed between 90 to 100 thousand residents each, along with shopping centres, swimming pools, theatres, stadiums, and places of work and industry on the lower levels. Each Megablock generated its own power and recycled its own waste: it also sowed and harvested certain crops depending on its location. These were done not under a sun but great artificial globes, climate-controlled, and grown to exact nutritional and size specifications. Amy thought that was stupid but there was no doubt about it – everything she had eaten, from beef to broccoli – tasted better here. Megablocks were allocated seeds or animals, and not permitted everything, so as to foster trade between Megablocks. In order to prevent shortages in case of disease or catastrophe, up to three Megablocks could share allocations, but no two had the exact same harvest. Amy and the Doctor’s was allowed fisheries for salmon, mussels, and other seafood; wheat and barley; blueberry and raspberry farms; and coffee beans, among other things.

Each Megablock had a theme, and this was the key to navigation. If Amy needed to attend an address in Yousafzai, then she knew that was Megablock 1, Earth Notables. If the Doctor told her he was in a bar in Banksia and _could-she-come-and-get-him-NOW-Pond_ , after he’d run up an impossible tab because he didn’t consider the consequences of buying everyone chocolate wazoos, then she knew that was Megablock 5, Flora. Amy and the Doctor lived in Megablock 9.

Their address was ridiculous.

Unit D11, Level 289  
Gypsum Tower C  
Glaucodot Expressway  
Megablock 9, Quadrant 3  
Kepler 62-F

She still couldn’t keep it straight in her head.

Amy had found work in Pardalote, within a neighbouring Megablock. It was a commute of thirty-nine minutes on the Tube (whose speeds positively blitzed those from her own time) to travel the 402 kilometre distance from her nearest station to the one in Pardalote. Technically, Amy didn’t have to work. A psychic paper could do magnificent things. Using it to fudge their way into places they would not otherwise gain access as an innocent or lifesaving mechanism was one thing. Continually using it to keep themselves in knickers was entirely different and … and Amy knew that was a slippery slope. Besides … working got her out of the flat. It opened up her world to people who didn’t include the Doctor. 

Amy swiped her way through the gates and headed for the Tube. The bullet-shaped shuttles departed frequently, so she did not walk with any particular hurry. Another would always be along. It was somewhat unusual that she should work in a different Megablock to where she lived. For convenience’s sake, most people transferred to the one in which they were employed. Amy’s decision was based on the fact that, unfortunately, she was actually not very employable. She wasn’t from this time. She adjusted quickly, but there were huge gaps in her education and basic knowledge of tech and events. Her upskilling was happening gradually. It meant there was no way she could just blend in to the workforce. The few trials she was given had all ended in disaster. The job she had now was … eye-rollingly typical, really.

She turned up the collar of her jacket against the sharp breezes which rolled through the station. Amy stepped out on the gleaming platform and strolled to the far end. Experience told her it was less likely to be crowded this far along. Bright advertisements animated the shiny grey-white walls, responding as the motion sensors were triggered. She passed a promotion for teeth whitening, cider-making (this seemed all the rage) and finally, designer babies, which was a lucrative business. She stood before the silent ad and wondered how she felt about it.

“Excuse me.”

“Hello, yes?” Amy turned. 

A woman around her own age was standing beside her. She was a little shorter than Amy, her skin pierced with that glittering body art that was so popular at the moment. It looked pretty in the right light, but in the dark, they looked like mo-cap gone horribly wrong. The most obvious feature the woman possessed (besides the silvery implants dotted up her arms and neck) was a shock of ruby-red hair piled on her head.

“Your shade,” she said, eyes combing the length of Amy’s own hair, “it’s so beautiful. I’ve been trying to match it since, I don’t know, _birth._ Where do you get it done?”

“Er, thanks, but I don’t.”

“You do it yourself?”

“No … it’s my own. Born with it. Just came out this way.”

The girl stared for a second, and then she laughed. “Okay, so it’s a secret! Just give me a hint, seriously, feed my inner ginger. I am actually all ginger, or I should be.”

Amy glanced toward the tunnel. She could feel the air pressure changing and, sure enough, there was a gentle chime an instant later. The shuttle was arriving. “There’s no secret. I told you – this is my hair.”

“Oh come on, everybody knows there are no gingers anymore. Not real ones.”

“What?”

“That was bred out years ago. And blondes.”

Amy puzzled. She nodded her chin toward the ad, where a clutch of little babies with fair hair sat together in a big stork nest. The effect was supposedly adorable, but it looked more like an ad for those creepy Baby Reborns Amy remembered. “What about them?”

“They’ll be the first blondes and gingers born in generations. If the legislation passes. Everybody knows that, so you can’t fool me or anyone else by sayin’ you’re born with it. So, out with it,” she added, cheerfully persistent if not a little annoyed, “what’s your secret?”

“You’re saying there’s no gingers. Or blondes, but who cares, no gingers?”

“…no,” the girl said, either taking Amy for a moron or the best stonewaller ever. She hoisted her backpack and prepared to move off. “Yeah thanks anyway, but.”

Alone, Amy looked at the ad. The shuttle rolled into the tunnel. “Get out,” she muttered, amused. She touched her hair. Now she thought about it, she did remember something about this in school. Dominant genes. She’d seen lots of redheads and blondes while she was here, and now it seemed none of them were the real thing. She supposed there were no people with green or blue eyes now, either.

Until the legislation passed …

Once on the shuttle, Amy pulled out her phone. Nobody was calling them phones now, they called them comms, but that lingo hadn’t stuck with her yet. And calling it a phone fit in with her job so she wasn’t in any hurry to change her vocabulary. She pulled up pages, suddenly intrigued by what she had learned. The girl on the platform was right: blondes and redheads had been genetically eliminated. Designer babies had been in existence for some time but always monitored, so only negative defects were eliminated (for a cost!) and no actual selection of hair, eye or skin colour could be chosen. That might soon be changing and this generated great debate. Reintroducing people with her hair colour seemed to be one of the selling points. Huh. How about that?

_Did you know there are no more redheads or blondes?? I am literally the last, did you know that?_

The Doctor responded to her text a few minutes later. He’d gotten better with this in recent weeks, though he always used speech-to-text as he had no patience for the fiddly buttons.

_No._  
Well yes.  
I mean you are.   
Only not really. 

_Is this because I’m not from here, is that what you mean?_

_No I mean keep that to yourself._

Dear god, he was painful. Amy blinked at her phone and considered just putting it away. _I didn’t get it printed on a t-shirt if that’s what you’re afraid of._

_You’re not the last._

_The genetic baby thing? Yeah I saw._

_Pond did you ever hear about albinos in Tanzania?_

Amy frowned. Yeah, she had. During her time, albinos in that part, and other areas of Africa were rumoured to have certain powers. People hunted them to lop off entire body parts. They ground their bones to a fine powder, and they were used by witchdoctors or sold on the black market. Many albinos willingly moved into leper colonies because it was the only place they could be safe from hunters. While she was remembering, the Doctor texted again.

_Keep it to yourself._

_Where are they? People don’t know. This person I was talking to just said they were gone???_

_I don’t know. Places that aren’t nice. What did you tell this person?_

_That it was my own hair of course because you didn’t tell me that apparently I’ve got the hope diamond of hair???_

_Tell her otherwise._

_You tell her otherwise she’s gone now and I’m on the Tube._

Amy dumped her phone in her bag, considering the conversation over. She loved the Doctor but he was still the most maddening person she knew. Anyone else would consider that titbit of information of utmost importance for her personal safety, but he somehow managed to forget to tell her. It wasn’t malice or neglect. He probably meant to tell her ten times, and had become distracted by something shiny in the instant between the thought forming and the words falling from his mouth.

She glanced around the shuttle. There was no sign of the girl with ruby-red hair – she must be on another link. Amy sighed and settled back. There was no point trying to track her down. It would just sound suspicious. Besides, people lied about enhancements all the time, didn’t they? This was just another lie in a sea of common lies.

Once in Pardalote, Amy made her usual way to the store. She never allowed herself to completely switch off. The Doctor always noticed everything and she tried to do the same. She swung into a small café for breakfast and munched on her pastry all the way to work.

Mal was already there by the time she arrived. The lights were on in the back room. Amy slipped inside and weaved amongst the untidy shelves. She worked for iRetro, a painful name for a vintage shop which sold antiques from her time period. Where she had struggled to find work because of lack of knowledge elsewhere, here she was considered a genius – if not a bit weird for knowing those things in the first place.

Amy shoved her bag in the corner. “Hey, morning Mal.”

Mal was a man in his thirties with a Ned Kelly beard. He was all right to her, even if he had been bothered he was no longer the best authority on vintage mp3 players. He still doubted Amy about several things but in the main, they got along. She watched him plug in a pistachio-coloured KitchenAid and then struggle to work out how to change attachments.

“Yeah, hi, Amy. How was the weekend?”

“Fine.” Amy stepped in and flipped the switch. She pushed the top part of the mixer back and then picked up the whisk attachment. Wordlessly, she showed Mal how to lock it into place.

“Smartarse. Get up to anything?”

“No.” Beat. Amy recognised a new opportunity. “I um, had my hair done? Dyed.”

“Dyed?”

“Yeah you know – my hair.”

“It’s too early to show off with your retro lingo. Just say you used colour crawlers.”

Amy hesitated. “Okay yeah, colour crawlers. I crawled that colour, root to tip!”

“Uh huh.” He wasn’t remotely interested. 

She opened the shop. It was a pretty quiet day. Someone tried to trade in CDs which Amy wouldn’t accept, partly because they were Kings of Leon and partly because there weren’t enough working disc players in circulation for CDs to be worth anything. She sold a few things – junk jewellery of that period was enjoying a revival, as were Pop! Vinyls. Her day didn’t really become interesting until lunchtime, when the Doctor bounded through the door.

He navigated the aisles, its shelves stuffed with barely categorised junk, with skips, bounds and a single twirl. He dumped an enormous brown paper bag on the counter. It was weakening with grease spots. In his other hand was a clear recycled tray containing two large drinks from Timbucks. 

“Hello! Pond. Brought you lunch. Because of, well, you know, this morning.”

“Thanks!” Amy leaned forward, grinning, intrigued. “What’ve we got?”

The Doctor waved his hand over the drinks. “These, just a little thing I made up myself. Taste it. See if you can spot the secret ingredient!”

It never ceased to impress Amy how the Doctor could integrate himself into any situation. She had stopped asking questions. She didn’t bother to check how he had slipped behind the counter at Timbucks to invent a brand new drink: it was just one of those things that he did. 

Amy brought the cup to her face. She eased off the lid and looked down at the liquid – it was, by all appearances, just coffee. Smiling, she sniffed it.

“Butterscotch? And … mango?”

“Yes! Yes!” He was delighted those two contrasting scents were prevalent. “And something else. Try it!”

Amy sipped. Nope, not poisonous, not revolting. Not delicious either, but it was perhaps the kind of flavour that would grow on her over time. She drank a little more and allowed the liquid to pool on her tongue before swallowing. “I can’t … I’m not sure.”

“Guess!”

“I … maybe chicken?”

“ _Chicken?!_ There is absolutely no chicken in there! How can you taste chicken?” He snatched her cup and took a quick mouthful. “What’s wrong with your tastebuds!”

“Well I don’t know!” Amy exclaimed, snatching the drink back. She tried it again. “It seemed like a safe bet. Lots of things taste like chicken. What’s for lunch?”

“Nothing, until you can tell me what the special ingredient is.”

“Octopus.”

“If you can’t take this seriously – “

“I don’t know! I’m sorry, but I really don’t!”

The Doctor eyed her for a moment, clearly disappointed. “…it’s jam.”

“Oh.”

“Fig jam.”

“Oh okay.”

“It’s fig jam.”

“Yeah I got that, but I can’t taste it.”

“I can taste it.”

“Well you have magic tastebuds or something. But you also put _mango_ and butterscotch in there and I can’t taste anything else.”

“Human tastebuds are so – “

“What’s for lunch?” Amy piped up brightly. She hated it when he got on a roll about human shortcomings. For someone who had spent so much time around them, his knowledge often seemed thin. He always held humans in such high regard and became bitterly let down when some tiny detail did not measure up, like possessing mystery-solving tastebuds.

Lunch happened to be two enormous sandwiches. Like most of the Doctor’s food art it contained a dizzying array of ingredients which ought not have worked together, but somehow did. They ate in the back room of the shop. While Amy finished her meal, the Doctor cannibalised a few bits of junk and turned the KitchenAid into a radio capable of picking up signals from the other side of the planet.

“Did you find that person who asked after your hair?” He mumbled to her while trying to extend the signal. 

Amy looked up from where she was picking poppy seeds off her loaf. “No. She was gone. I was on the shuttle, remember.” She frowned. “Why didn’t you tell me anyway, if it was so important?”

“I didn’t think it would come up.”

“Where do they go, Doctor?”

“Told you. Somewhere … not nice.”

“I’m not seven anymore. You can tell me.”

The Doctor looked up at her. He regarded her solemnly for a moment, and then is features broke out into an easy smile. He flipped a switch and the radio suddenly burst into foreign, alien song. It sounded like the music made when a wet fingertip was run around the edge of a wineglass.

“There. Gives you something decent to sell now, doesn’t it?”


	3. Now

In this, his Eleventh body, the Doctor found himself in the possession of hands which could capture the image of his mind’s eye. It had taken him years to realise this skill and he did not often employ it; only when he found himself driven almost to the point of madness to focus himself on one, agonising, fine thing.

The pencil flew across the notepad. He drew lines with quick, precise determination. He sat cross-legged on the sofa in their Gypsum flat, the pad sitting across his legs. Hunched, intent, he only paused now and again only to erase a rebellious line, and brush the rubbings aside. 

Or look at her.

This was his secret.

In order to protect it, he had taken to lying to Amy. In each notebook, he filled a few pages with quick drawings that did not matter. The TARDIS console in exact detail; the splendid round things; the arches holding up the swimming pool ceiling. Oh, they were all dear to him, but in comparison to protecting his secret they did not matter – they did not compare. Amy had seen these drawings. He showed them to her because she was so damned nosy! If he did not invent a cover she would just go searching. So the Doctor drew details of the TARDIS and eventually, as he thought, she lost interest and stopped asking. He no longer feared she would paw through his notebooks when he was looking the other way. And so, with Amy’s attention diverted, he was free to continue to draw her.

Over and over.

It was because he was stuck with her, of course. He could not run wild in the universe and distract himself with thousands of other sights and adventures, and Amy had become something of a permanent feature in his life.

Despite his talent, nothing the Doctor drew was good enough, at least not when compared to realising her face. His lead strokes could illustrate her laughter, her frustration, the innocent widening of her eyes when he had found some new, small wonder with which to spoil her. But he could not skewer her precisely in his drawings and he snapped pencils in half and notebooks shut in disgust when he perceived another failure. Any idiot could make a representation on paper. Only a true master of hand and instrument could capture a living being of grace and truth.

Most of the time he sketched from memory, too afraid she would suspect. Now that he had successfully misled her into believing he only drew the TARDIS over and again, he was able to risk a little more. She lay across the rug on the floor, on a masterpiece of knotted fibres imitating Aurora Australis. It was a fantasy of colour and, against it, Amy's hair looked particularly vibrant and her skin especially porcelain. She was casual in denim shorts which drove him crazy and a layered contraption of tops; always, a grey marl under the blue. The tag flopped out the back. Her hair was worked up into a lazy, untidy knot, leaving too many locks to tumble distractingly loose, grazing her bare shoulders or her jaw or her cheek. These were realised in long swirls in the Doctor's latest sketch. The Aurora rose to meet her and she tumbled within it, swimming, floating, evolving, stars and freckles …

Her long fingers dealt cards. She was playing with the set he'd given her long ago, dug out of his pockets when searching for the psychic paper to avoid arrest for trespassing. Her hands were full of junk he thrust at her to hold - yoyos (why two, he hadn't the foggiest) and cake and a miniature dolphin in a bottle and, finally, the complete set of 45 Heez cards. The Doctor hadn't gotten those back, though everything else was shoved in his bigger-on-the-inside pocket the instant they were allowed to go about their business. She liked the way the card values changed and, once she'd taught herself a few games, took them most places with her. The Doctor had tried to teach her but had become too frustrated with her inability to understand the rules.

Or perhaps it was the fact that he kept forgetting them, or mixing them up with other games.

Heez cards were good because there were so many solo games to play. With the changing values, it was almost like playing with another person. Her legs swung in the air behind her, tapping ankle to ankle. 

The Doctor glanced at her over the top of his pad. He was out of her line of sight, meaning she missed those significant little looks. He paid excruciating detail to the stitching on the back pockets of her shorts, knowing why, but telling himself it really was just an interesting pattern. 

"Not fair," Amy mumbled to the cards, evidently displeased by the latest change in value. He saw her forehead crease in consternation as she carefully selected which card to play next. "Ha!" She announced, victorious.

Momentarily distracted, her latest shout had him looking back at his pad. Sometimes she liked to gloat, and she might look his way to do that. He affected the most casual of expressions to the point where he nearly began to whistle, but Amy disappointed him, and did not look his way.

And then, just as he looked up once more, she suddenly swept herself around. Amy's supple body did whatever she asked, no question, and she was now resting on her side with her arm stretched out, body curled, looking back at him. He did a double take and tried to focus, tried to act natural. 

"I am so good at this game," she declared, having apparently beaten it so satisfyingly that she was going to enjoy an extended period of gloating. "It put all the yellows into double negatives and I still managed to Jinx It."

"What are you playing?" He asked, eyes on the paper. He fiercely coloured in one corner.

"…Jinx It," she replied as if he were very dense. 

"Oh. Are you playing positives or negatives?"

" _Positives!_ God, get your ears checked!"

Amy twisted back to her game. The Doctor smiled benignly to himself, feeling awfully clever. His pencil moved back to the drawing but it had again gone as far as he could take it and, incomplete, he closed the pad. 

He put it on the sofa beside him. The pencil rolled off and down the back, to join the countless others lost this way, and he sat forward. Stood. Amy was beginning another game, but he saw the randomiser already activating and the deck shimmered, values changing. He squatted beside Amy and reached toward her back. One finger, one thumb, pinched together to gently take the offending clothes tag in hand, and tuck it back in.

"Thanks," Amy muttered, disinterested.

His four digits gently pressed to her bare skin. There were galaxies of freckles scattered across her back, soft in this light but louder in sunshine, marking the journey of her life. He swept them up in a movement he could not control and felt Amy tense, just a little, under his finger pads.

The Doctor lifted his hand away and stood.

"Put those daffy cards away, Pond!" He announced, leaping straight out of the fray. "I have something to show you!"

And damn her, _damn her_ , she just rolled on to her back as lazy as a Sunday morning sleep in, or a cat who got the cream and stretched her arms over her head.

"What?"

He stared back down.

"Hello up there?"

"Yes! Good! Right! I made something. You're going to love it."

Amy winced. “Please tell me you didn’t rewire the toaster again.”

“I made it _better_.”

“I do not need my breakfast talking back to me before I’ve finished my first cup of coffee.”

The Doctor looked around. “What happened to Roger anyway?”

“Um,” Amy bounded up to her feet. “You were saying? An invention?”

He forgot about the mystery of Roger the Talking Toaster and grabbed Amy’s hand. As he rushed her to the door he heard her protesting her lack of footwear but it didn’t matter, because they wouldn’t be going that far. He hit one of the switches by the door and the block-out tinting activated within the window panes, plunging them into darkness. 

“Well colour me impressed,” Amy commented lightly. “You finally figured out how to turn the lights off.”

“Patience, Amelia, I’m letting your eyes adjust.”

Still holding her hand, the Doctor activated another switch. It had previously turned the downlights on and it did again, only this time with Time Lord pizazz. The eight lights projected light, purples and blues and spangled with tiny silver diamonds. He had given her the known universe in a room. The projections patterned the floor, the walls, the furniture and them: it didn’t care, and the shapes in the room gave form to the bottomless expanse they had once travelled so freely. The Doctor had tested this before but he _needed_ Amy; he needed to see it through her eyes, and feel it with the innocence and wonder of one so young. As she gasped – just softly, just a sudden intake of star-laden oxygen – and walked forward, he felt the emotion fill him up, too. He was old now, so old, and like all elderly grew ever more dependent on the youth. Only, the Doctor’s handicap was not his body or his mind but his heart and soul. Any being who had seen as much as he, and travelled so far, would ultimately become jaded. The Doctor meant it when he said his friends were the best part of him. Through them he saw, felt, and loved.

A galaxy shaped like Amelia Pond drifted through the dark matter. He watched her, as near and far as she had ever been, and smiled. It was only a simple thing to calibrate the lights and the holograms, but this stroke of casual genius had to be one of his best creations. It was definitely up there with Roger the Talking Toaster.

After a few moments, he began to move, too. They moved silently, almost in a dance. With a rush of clarity he realised they were both doing the same thing: looking for home. The difference was Amy could find hers eventually, but there was no Gallifrey in even a simulated universe. He stared at other worlds instead, counting stars to find them, and the memories of eleven lifetimes flowed over him.

Amy was lost.

Wordless, the Doctor circled her. She, an imprint of protons, neutrons and electrons, was gazing in the wrong place, her eyes attempting to make sense of trillions of diamonds. He stopped on the other side of her light – the holograms were best illuminated beneath each of the eight downlights – and smiled at her through it. Distracted, it took her a second to find him. She smiled back. The Doctor reached into the light for her hand and felt her fingers close around his, where they belonged. Gently, he pulled her along, navigating as always he had done, finding another way to show her worlds. He pointed out places they had been together with whispers until, at last, they were in her galaxy. His hand raised hers, placing her fingertip directly beneath her world. 

“Beautiful,” she said. 

The Doctor placed his hand on her cheek and leaned forward just enough to kiss her forehead. 

“I’m sorry, Pond. Stranding you here. So far from home.”

She dropped her finger and the moment she looked away, he knew she would forget which diamond she had held. “Home’s here.”

“It’s just a projection.”

“I mean you, moron.”

He liked that. He couldn’t help it. His smile became a grin, and he twisted a little on the spot. Amy laughed and threw her arms around his shoulders for a big, tight hug. But when he squeezed and lifted her back, she gave a grunt of pain.

“Amy?”

“I – sorry. Could you put the light back on?”

“Are you all right?”

“Yeah, just feel a bit sick, is all.”

He released her and reached into his pocket for the sonic screwdriver. He pointed at the bank of switches by the door and restored the settings to how they had been before. He looked at Amy, frowning, and then began sonicking her. Amy brushed it aside before he could get a complete reading.

“Don’t, I hate it when you do that.”

“Let me do it properly, it did suggest high – “

“I hate it when you do that! I’m fine. I just felt weightless, is all. Made me feel a bit sick. But I’m fine now. Really.”

“…if you’re sure,” he answered firmly, searching her face with his eyes. He wondered if he could sneak a quick read in, but Amy was faster.

“Don’t you dare! I’m fine, right? Think I just need some food.”

“Humans. You’re all so – “

“Don’t even finish that sentence if you want to live to your next meal! You can’t talk anyway. Bloody garbage guts, you are.”

“I’m capable of digesting large amounts of food, yes, but I’m also capable of going far longer without sustenance and – “

“Yeah yeah yeah. Just get over here and help me work out what sustenance we’re gonna digest tonight, okay?”

The Doctor followed her into the kitchen. The room was just a room again, nothing special, no galaxies or diamonds. His gaze dropped to where Amy was rubbing her side as she peered into the fridge, and quickly averted when she looked his way. Sometimes there was no point in arguing with Amelia Pond. He knew how to pick his battles.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My great friend Thete, the Eleven to my Amy, who has been rping the pair of them with me for four years now originally came up with the idea of the Doctor drawing Amy. It happened in what I think was our second story - Amy found a clutch of erotic drawings of herself in the Doctor's possession, and it was such a wonderful idea that I immediately headcanoned it. I think her idea predated BOSJ. Anyway, I could not include this in the story without crediting Thete properly. Cheers, bro. <3


	4. My

The fact was that Amy's stomach hurt, and she couldn't sleep no matter what she tried. When she was small Aunt Sharon would tell her to curl up into a little ball when she felt sick and go to sleep like that, all tucked up. It was one of the rare pearls of wisdom that she utilised from her Aunt, who otherwise excelled in boring Amy to tears with her pragmatism. There was some comfort in tucking oneself up that way. Amy thought it had to do with some lasting impression of the womb.

The position eased her discomfort but she still could not sleep. She tried all the old tricks. She counted people like sheep, imagining them leaping over a low-lying fence, half submerged in greedy grass. People she knew, people from home. Some sailed over the fence with otherworldly grace; some launched like bullfrogs; some hardly made it over at all. Picturing their precise mannerisms of fence-leaping usually helped her drift off, but not that night. So she switched tactics and ran through the alphabet thinking of alien cities or planets she'd visited, and then tried to think of as many songs with a day of the week in their title as she could. _Manic Monday, Ruby Tuesday … Friday On My Mind, Saturday Night, Lazy Sunday_. She puzzled over an entry for Wednesday and Thursday and thumped the pillow in lethargic aggravation. It wasn't going to work. 

Finally, bereft of sleep, Amy threw back the covers. She padded across her darkened room and activated the dwall (doors and walls were such relative things in Kepsix housing) to allow her through. A light was still on in the Doctor's room. He kept unusual hours, and his claims of when and how much sleep he needed to function wildly varied. She wasn't sure even he knew how often he got it. Whatever the case, he seldom used the bed, though Amy was always clearing it off when she visited. Just in case.

Her bare feet took her in. She did not bother to knock. The Doctor was hunched over a crowded desk with a pair of goggles pressed over his eyes. These were pushed up his forehead as she entered, causing his thick hair to stand up at all angles.

"Amelia?"

"Don't. Shut up. Tired. Here."

Amy stumped forward and took hold of the front of his shirt. He went with her, perhaps too surprised to protest, and stood only as she pulled him to the bed. If he hadn't risen, Amy would have dragged him across the floor. Once at the bed she pushed him on to it, moving his arms and legs about as if he were no more than a lump of play-doh, until he was in the right spot. She then lay with him and curled her body to face his. 

She could feel him next to her, his body temperature running so much cooler than her own, body stiff with confusion and uncertainty. He would not relax and, until he did, she would not slacken her grip. The eye cylinders of his goggles were digging in to the top of her head. 

"…Amelia …"

"Learned my lesson, won't touch you," she replied curtly, thinking of the first - and so far only - real attempt she had made propositioning him. "Got my pride. Can't sleep." She took a deep breath. "Need this."

The Doctor hesitated for a moment too long and then, thankfully, finally, his muscles relaxed. She allowed her bunched fists to blossom open. He smelled funny, like oil and buzzed electronics, but she didn't care, especially not when she felt his hand lift her hair over one shoulder and settle around her waist. 

"Sometimes it just doesn’t do to sleep alone," he mumbled, as if agreeing with words unsaid. 

"You don't know anything about sleep," she replied, her words running together.

His long fingers stroked through her hair. It was precisely the pressure she liked, and each stroke brushed over her temple. "I know it is an altered state of consciousness. Most species rely on some form of it, probably to rest their minds and allow cellular repair. I know that even I need a little."

"Do you sleep upside-down like a vampire?"

"No, and vampires don't sleep upside-down - even you know that."

"Do you dream?"

"Everyone dreams."

"Do you remember your dreams, then?"

"Always."

"What's in them?"

He filled his chest with air and heaved a great sigh. "Scottish brats who won't sleep."

" _Can't_ sleep."

"And why not?"

"Don't feel right."

"I think you're homesick."

"I'm not," she replied, sleepy but with a testy edge. "It will always be there."

"But not when you want it, and I think you want it now."

"I don't. I just want to sleep. And you should be quiet."

Amy didn't appreciate it when he gave these subtle little insights with pinpoint accuracy. Everything seemed to fly over his head until he wanted it otherwise; and he would then recall tiny instances from the past with frightening clarity. The last thing she wanted from the Doctor was to be psychoanalysed. She'd endured quite enough of that for one lifetime from people technically better qualified, but less experienced, than him.

He went quiet. He was likely itching to get back to his work, but for her sake, he remained where she wanted him. On paper, the Doctor didn't make the best sleeping buddy. For a start, his body temperature ran colder than that of a human, so snuggling up didn't generate much warmth. He was also seldom still, though he was being remarkably patient just now. And given that he was lean and tall, a jumble of limbs like a Daddy Long Legs spider, he didn't look like he'd be comfortable. Yet somehow their bodies fitted well together. Amy was as comfortable as could be. Her mind abandoned counting people and filling in blanks and her body stopped sending out pain signals. She slept.

When she woke however, he was gone. She wasn’t surprised. Amy rolled on to her back as she woke and hissed, breath escaping between gritted teeth. The dull pain from before had developed into a cramp. She supposed she had lain in one position for far too long. She gingerly stretched herself out, easing the knots out of the pain as her legs lengthened, and she felt some reprieve as she gently rubbed her abdomen. 

The Doctor had switched off the lights but left the door open for her. Morning light spilled through. She had no solid way of telling time in here, and wondered if she was late for work. Amy pulled herself up into a sitting position. Pushed back her long, tangled hair. 

“Ugh,” she murmured, putting her hand to her mouth. The change in position made her feel nauseous. She waited for her stomach to settle. It seemed she’d picked up some kind of bug. It happened, she had her hands on all kinds of tenth-hand junk every day at work. It was nothing to get hysterical over. Amy was used to pushing through. 

She staggered to her feet. Quickly, she realised the flat was empty. Empty spaces called out, they were obvious, as if the air was thinner for lack of living souls. She looked around the Doctor’s room. It really was an awful jumble. Every surface was covered in electronics, tools, odds and ends. There was also an extraordinary quantity of tea cups and mugs and Amy realised now why she struggled to find any when she needed them. Sighing, she stood and grabbed two, looping the handles around her fingers. The porcelain clinked together.

Then, as she lifted a third, her eye caught sight of the handwritten paperwork underneath. It was the Doctor’s hand, the wide, angular scrawl she had only seen a few times before but had never forgotten.  


_How you must have suffered getting accustomed to me,_  
_my savage, solitary soul, my name that sends them all running._  
_So many times we have seen the morning star burn, kissing our eyes,_  
_and over our heads the gray light unwind in turning fans._  


_My words rained over you, stroking you._  
_A long time I have loved the sunned mother-of-pearl of your body._  
_I go so far as to think that you own the universe._

Hastily, Amy flipped the page over, her eyes working through his difficult penmanship.

_I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells,_  
_dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses._  
_I want_  
_to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees._

There was no more. Without thinking she began to lift other things in the immediate vicinity in search of the rest of the poem. She did not know if he had made it up or if it belonged to some other poet, in some other time. Then again, she supposed, there was a chance he and that other poet were one and the same. It had happened before. At any rate there was no more and no hints as to why he had written it out, or who he had thought of.

The TARDIS, probably. He liked stroking that console with his long, flat-tipped fingers. He would touch her absently, like an old lover, seeking and providing that casual comfort habit afforded. If she called him on it he would go red. The colour blossomed from his neck and spread up to the tips of his ears. _Get a room!_ She’d say, and he would mutter something back about her being crass and humans being unable to think of anything else.

Neither could he, though, apparently. He had books and books of drawings of the TARDIS. Every time she looked at him he was out with his pencil, sketching buttons and archways and the mosaic in the swimming pool with exact detail. It was partly endearing, and partly annoying.

Amy gave up and padded into the kitchen. The Doctor had left some breakfast pastries out for her. They were the kind she liked, too, with the multiple layers of thin flaky pastry and the yellow custard filling. She picked one up and considered eating just to settle her stomach, but ultimately decided against it.

The TARDIS didn’t have anything mother-of-pearl, and nothing ‘sunned.’ Perhaps she was being too literal. What had it said? _I love the sunned mother-of-pearl of your body._ And then something about owning the universe. Well, that made sense. She’d never seen a man love his motor that much. 

It was around forty minutes before she would ordinarily head to work. She needed that time today. Amy took her time showering and dressing and told herself she was starting to feel better. It was just taking her awhile to keep going, but her appetite did not make an appearance. Nonetheless, she took one of the pastries and wrapped it up in port-a-plastic for later. Port-a-plastic was one of those cheerful inventions Amy enjoyed. It worked like cling wrap, except it hardened when you tapped it twice to form a little plastic box.

Amy walked. Tube. She glanced at the advertisement spreading along the wall and automatically looked for the ginger fangirl, but there was no sign of her this day. She boarded a car when the shuttle arrived and eased herself into a seat, trying to find a position to be comfortable. Perhaps she should’ve taken a sick day. She would’ve thought she’d ample time to walk it off by now. Well, if it wasn’t better by lunch that was it, Mal was on his own, she’d head home. There was no sense wrecking herself over a senseless job.

“Mornin’,” Karen said as she clomped into the office. 

She took off her light coat and hung it from a brass peg. Mal was flicking through a pile of old automotive magazines. They were each in a thick plastic pocket to protect their fragile pages, which Amy could see were bent and yellowed, crumbling. She couldn’t see the year from where she stood but the cars looked approximately from her time. It was pretty impressive the paper had survived this long.

“Hey,” he glanced up, scratching his thick beard. It was meticulously shaped into an oval. “You look like shit. What kind of night did you have?”

“I didn’t go out,” she replied. She pressed a blue button inset on the wall, activating a floor length mirror. She did look paler than usual, she supposed. A bit clammy. “I just didn’t feel so good.”

“You all right to be here?”

“See how I go. Might just shake if off as the day goes on.”

Mal eyed her. He was paranoid about illnesses. Apparently, twenty-odd years ago, an unusual virus had shut an entire Megablock down into quarantine. It had a fatality rate of around forty percent. It had made Amy realise there were an entire universes of nasties she might pick up. She’d gotten herself immunised against as many as she could which had raised a few eyebrows. Most citizens were inoculated as infants.

“Coughing? Sneezing? Muscle aches?”

“Nope, nope, no.”

“Any pain?”

“Just one kind of in my side.”

Mal’s eyes dropped to her waist. Then he raised his eyebrows and looked away, shaking his head. “That time of the month then, isn’t it?”

“Oh get off, what would you know about it?”

“It’s not some huge secret. You know there are things called films and books and they do talk about it. It’s not some female mystery that we know nothing about.”

“Oh so what you know my body better than I do, now?”

Mal shrugged. “It’s just what it sounds like to me.”

“Well you can just shut up about it.”

That was the end of the conversation. It couldn’t be said that she and Mal were great pals: they worked together and he grudgingly valued her knowledge, but they definitely didn’t spend time together outside of work. Amy secretly suspected her personality was too strong for Mal, who preferred his partners to be meeker and less argumentative. 

Amy opened the shop to the public. She couldn’t find the motivation to do any work, and alternated pacing in the hopes of alleviating the pain in her side, to leaning across the counter, to sitting up on the stool. Finally, she felt her gorge rising. She dashed out the back and shouted at Mal to take over. She made it to the loo just in time to vomit. Given that she had eaten nothing since the night before, it was mostly bile, and it burned the lining of her throat. 

Amy sat back against the wall, panting. Her clothes stuck to her body and sweat beaded on her brow. With scarcely any warning, she was sick again, and she clamped her fingers around a fistful of hair at the nape of her neck.

There was a tentative knock, and Mal opened the door a crack. “….Jesus, Amy.”

“I think I need the Doctor,” she said, raising a trembling hand to wipe her mouth. “Something’s wrong.”

He gave a quick nod and ducked out. How did he know how to reach the Doctor, she wondered? And then she realised he _didn’t_.

“Not any doctor! My Doctor!” She cried after him, but she was sick again before she could get him back and clear it up.

Mal came back looking awkward. He had a glass of water in a rainbow-striped glass. Amy was nearly senseless with the pain by then. She felt as if her side were on fire, and that heat blazed through her body. She moaned. Only now did she realised how badly the pain had been dogging her footsteps all day, but she had been too stubborn to let it in. The spate of vomiting seemed to have inflamed it. Her head lolled on the wall as Mal pushed the glass into her hand and she tried to focus on it.

“…I used to have a glass like this. Different. Stripes … were higher. Mal, the Doctor ..”

“I called them, any minute.”

“No, it has to be _mine_.”

“You just need whoever’s closest. Drink this.”

He pushed the glass at her mouth too roughly, and liquid slipped down her chin and neck.

“No, my Doctor, you know him.”

“Amy, you told me yourself he wasn’t a real doctor.”

“ _Just call him!_

Mal left and came back with her communicator. He tried once, and then again. He held it out. “There’s no answer.”

Amy groaned in frustration. “Where the hell is he?”

 

Amy didn’t see the Doctor before her surgery. But he was there when she woke up, his blurry shape coming into the form she knew so well. The Doctor was sitting by the bed. His tweed was off, leaving him in a light blue shirt with red braces stretched across his lean torso. His spine was curved forward and he sat with his forearms on his knees, his forehead crumpled in deep worry lines. Amy did not think she made a sound but something registered: he turned swiftly to see her. 

“Amelia.”

He twisted to face her properly, his cool palm automatically going to her forehead. His expression was utterly disarming: all love, all care, all devotion. Her heart skipped a beat – Amy didn’t even know that they could actually do that. She didn’t think anyone had ever looked at her like that. She knew nobody ever would again.

“Where were you?” Amy asked in a small voice. It didn’t sound like her own to her ears. It was too soft, too weak.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I was … you know me. I got here a few hours ago. You’ve been out for quite awhile.” Pause. “Do you remember what happened?”

Amy nodded. “My appendix.”

She tore her gaze from the Doctor. She was in a bright recovery room. The walls were lemon yellow with cream trim, and there was a false window projecting images of a big garden ruffled by a soft breeze. She could see the slight quiver around the edges to tell her it was a projection and not real. She was dressed in a short white gown. A thin IV ran into her arm, a fraction of the size of those she’d known. Though groggy, she didn’t feel so bad. Not nearly as bad as she should’ve.

“Yes. Your appendix. I should’ve known. I should’ve …” the Doctor looked temporarily away, bothered. “It’s not like it was in your time. Surgery, I mean. They removed it with a micro laser. Practically disintegrated it to be passed from your system naturally. Or they would’ve done. They didn’t actually do that. Slight problem, they don’t … do appendectomies anymore. Not here. Not now. Humans are a big messy work in progress. Changing all the time. And this far in your future, Amy, people aren’t … troubled by appendixes anymore. Most people aren’t born with an entire organ. Some just get a little stunted thing and others none at all. You’re the first recorded case of an appendectomy in a long time.”

Amy stared at him.

“So – so they removed it, you’re fine, bravo to them! And definitely, definitely, they’ve removed it with better skill than your own doctors could’ve. Emergency surgery is very far advanced from what you know now. Mind it still has a long way to go, some things are still positively barbaric – “

“Doctor.”

“ – but my point remains, it’s not quite as clean a surgery as it could have been. Your recovery period will be at least one day.”

“One day?”

“Two, if you’re unlucky.”

“That’s nothing. Can I go home?”

“Yes. And, Pond, I’m a wonderful nursemaid. You’ll soon see. I’ll take very good care of you.”

She was a little afraid of what that meant. Even so, she gave him a brave little nod and a smile. “You’d better.”

He took his hand from her forehead, but it was only so he could press a kiss there. Amy straightened his bow tie, pinching the fabric between thumb and forefinger.

“Do you think you’re well enough to leave, well, quite quickly?”

“…yeah?”

“Good. They’ll have a lot of questions, Pond. You’re almost as alien as I am.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I did not write that poem - of course I did not write that poem. It's an excerpt of a particularly magnificent piece by Pablo Neruda: 'Poem XIV: Every Day You Play". I really recommend looking up the entire poem. It's beautiful.


	5. Ship

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Long enough wait for you? This story isn't abandoned, and it's not over yet...

Amy woke to the sound of scuffling elsewhere in the flat. She was lying in her bed, the blue sheets folded over the yellow duvet. Sleeping during the day was one of her least favourite things. She always felt groggy and out of sorts when she woke; and it took too long to wake in the first place. She turned her head toward the doorway and willed her sluggish eyelids to stay open of their own accord. The remnants of a strange dream dogged her ascent into consciousness. Her legs had been leaden. Functional, but leaden, and she had been running and growing ever slower. In her dream there was frustration but no real panic: dream-Amy accepted that it was always so. Someone else had been in her dream, too, but she couldn’t see his face. She recalled stripes and a sense of familiarity, but little else. She concentrated and tried to remember ….

Her concentration was quashed by the arrival of a basket of flowers, apparently strolling into her room of their own accord. They were pulling the Doctor along with them and he deposited the unruly flowers into a large vase of knobbly green glass. They were an odd assortment. Amy squinted and reached for the petals. One variety was kind of yellow and spindly, with a centre like an engorged, mutated pansy. She didn’t think they were pretty. The others were though: lush in colour, graceful, elegant.

“Are those real?”

“Yes! Well, no. It depends on how you want to classify real. They’re not exactly the same … more clones, but close enough they might as well be. You couldn’t pick the difference.”

“Well, colour me impressed,” Amy dryly responded. “Those ones are bluebells, right?”

“Sort-of bluebells.”

“Uh huh. What are _those_?” She prodded one of the ugly plants.

“Witch-hazel!”

“Okay, untraditional bouquet,” she answered in good humour. She propped her head up on her hand and smiled across at the selection of flowers, ugly ones included. It was the Doctor and he had odd taste. She really couldn’t fault anyone for bringing her flowers. She did not notice the Doctor had left the room until he came back, now bearing a flat tray laden with breakfast. 

The Doctor was a remarkably good chef. Unreliable: if she requested coronation chicken she’d end up with some kind of exotic fish in a chocolate-based sauce which somehow worked. He made the kitchen his own when he took it on his shoulders to cook, and made delightful dishes out of practically nothing. He could not reliably say where he had learned all these wonders. The story constantly changed, so that Amy was sure the Doctor couldn’t actually remember. 

This she had learned: the Doctor forgot more people and things than he liked to let on. She forgave that easily. His life was long, his adventures legion. He seemed to find that unacceptable, however. He did not like to forget.

Today he had a stack of pancakes for her. They were fluffy and smelled of vanilla; golden, sticky maple syrup was drizzled over the top and a lump of fresh cream melted down the sides. It was too big for Amy to eat on her own and that had registered with him, too: there were knives and forks for them both. Also a teapot; with two little cups. Amy watched him fussing. He gave her two forks and then took both back and gave her two knives, before he realised the pattern was wrong and fixed it up. She started at one end of the stack and he the other.

“You’re looking better.”

“I feel all right,” Amy responded with her mouth full. “Just a bit tired.”

“Yes. Understandable. I imagine you’ll be up and about by the end of the day. Do you good just to stay put for a bit, let your body adjust.”

“Did you get my records?”

That had been a bit of a hitch. Mal had checked her into the hospital, and the staff had mistakenly sent all her records to him. The Doctor had wanted them recalled at once. 

“Yes. But they couldn’t tell us if they’d been opened.”

“It’ll be fine. It’s just Mal.”

“And you’re just not of this world,” he answered, a little firmly.

Amy was beginning to learn that this was something she needed to be more aware of. When they visited places quickly and came, and went, there was nothing to worry about. Living here was quite different. She was suddenly aware of how different she was, physically, to these futuristic humans. Her hair, that was one thing. Her appendix, that was another. They were beacons hailing her as different. They set her apart. 

“You need to keep a lower profile,” the Doctor lectured.

“I know, I get it. Look, I didn’t choose appendicitis. I didn’t wake up and go, hey, what a great idea!”

“Yes. But you need – “

“Well, maybe if you’d _told_ me – “

“What, I have to tell you everything now? I thought you were clever.”

“Oh, don’t. But as if something like that was going to occur to me! I’m not a geneticist, I’m not a - “

“A what?”

“A person who is – really into appendixes and other – organs – that might disappear.” Beat. “An appendixer.”

He grinned. “An appendixer.”

“You know what I’m saying!”

“An appendixer, though.”

“Oh you shut up.” She smirked and took another mouthful of pancakes. “These are good.”

“Yes, I’m quite good at these. Pancakes are my speciality.”

“I thought scones were your speciality.”

“Scones and pancakes.”

“And risotto.”

“Oh yes, I forgot risotto. Everything is my speciality.”

Amy thought for a moment. “Curry’s mine.”

There was a pause, and then a gentle, strained: “Is it, though?”

She looked up, shocked. “You _like_ my curries!”

“I, you know, well, I’ll _eat_ them.”

“I thought you liked my curries!” Amy was wounded. “What’s wrong with my curries?”

“They’re fine! Forget I said anything!”

“Oh no. No, you’ve started this now! What’s wrong with them?”

The Doctor winced. “Well, you’re not very … they’re not …. There’s not much curry in them.”

“….what?”

“They could be spicier. Yours are a bit .. well, bit bland, Pond.”

“…..oh get out. What is this: titanium Time Lord tongue?”

“I hadn’t thought of it like that. But yes, I suppose I can endure spicier food than you can.”

“So it’s not my curries. It’s your stupid Time Lordisms.”

“My biology.”

“Well if I made them any spicier I’d blow my own head off.”

“I’m not asking you to!”

“But you don’t like them!”

“I didn’t say that!”

“You said bland.”

“Yes, bland, but still nice, quite nice. If you didn’t put the word curry on them they’d just be fine as is.”

“Right well next time, I’ll make one for me, and put a whole box of curry powder in yours.”

“Fine.”

“Good.”

Another spat in a sea of little spats. Their banter was a comfortable way of life. They didn’t need to be precious with one another. Theirs was true companionship with every lively bump in the road.

Amy ate as much of the pancake stack as she could manage. Then, she lay back and rubbed her side. She caught the Doctor looking at her.

“It’s fine – just a bit tender, is all.”

“Perhaps I should pay your friend Mal a little visit, just ask what he’s seen.”

“Don’t,” Amy groaned. “It’ll just make everything weirder.”

“Yes, perhaps you’re right.”

“Besides – why would he look at my records? He would’ve seen right away that they were meant for us. Other people’s medical records really aren’t that interesting.”

“They are if someone develops an ailment that’s supposed to be redundant. Put it together, Pond. Retro-whiz-kid also has retro-whiz-condition.”

She shook her head slightly. “But time travel doesn’t – he’s not going to default to – “

“I didn’t say he would.”

“Well, then, can you say what you’re thinking because you’re spooking me a little here, okay?”

The Doctor refocused on her. “When I told you that people with your colouring just vanish … it’s because, well, you can imagine why. Trafficking. Terrible business. Those who still have your kind of genetic traits tend not to be from this so-called civilised culture. They live out on the rim. Other worlds, segregated by so many generations from this gene pool. They’re not going to think you’re a time traveller. They _could_ think you’re from out there, beyond, and that’s much more dangerous.”

“….great!” 

He beamed at her. “But! No need to worry! I’m sure good old Mal hasn’t opened your records. And if he has, I’m sure good old Mal won’t think _anything_ of it. We’re going to be fine!” He reached over and patted her leg in the most overblown, and least encouraging, fashion.

Amy wasn’t entirely reassured. Since she’d started running with the Doctor, she had encountered all kinds of threats. The latest had been a gigantic blind chicken-type creature, whom only Vincent van Gogh could see with the naked eye. Terrifying yes, but for Amy, impersonal. This threat was utterly personal. It was about her – it was about how genetics assembled her both inside and out. She must’ve looked bothered because the Doctor laughed and shook her leg again. Now it wasn’t just unencouraging, but also outright annoying.

He was right about her recovery time. The following morning saw Amy feeling a hundred percent better. The difference was incredible. The first thing she saw when she woke was the Doctor sitting in the sofa. She could tell by the way he was looking at the tablet that he was reading her records. He clicked his tongue and made disapproving sounds, like a history teacher reading a poor essay. When he saw her watching he grinned wildly and tucked the tablet behind his back.

“Nothing to worry about!”

Amy stood and walked toward him, holding out her hand. She was basically chasing him as he tried to move away. “Those are my records! Let me see. What do they say?”

“Healthy patient, good iron count, glucose and thyroid levels fine – “

“Doctor!”

“They think it might be pertinent for you to come by and have a little chat about your medical irregularity.”

She gave a great, exaggerated shrug. “So then I go _do_ that! Otherwise they’re just going to keep at us, right? We take the psychic paper, we go and make an explanation and then everything’s back to normal. You and me. Four walls, waiting for the TARDIS to whoosh back before we both go completely bonkers.”

The Doctor studied her quietly for a moment. He hadn’t really been listening, she realised, because he suddenly snapped to as if he’d been caught napping. “Yes. Of course. Run along, get changed – we’ll get it over with.”

Amy acknowledged his cooperation with a big nod. Satisfied they were on the same page and with a little help from the psychic paper that all of this would quickly blow over, she headed back into the bedroom. What the psychic paper would say she couldn’t imagine. What would pass as a plausible explanation? What would the experts swallow that would slake their curiosity? The same went, she thought as she pulled on a well-worn denim skirt, for Mal. Was he curious? Maybe she was just being paranoid. But Amy knew that were she in Mal’s position she definitely, absolutely, would have peeked in the file. She would not have been able to help herself and she felt the same stood for her employer. 

One again, Amy felt the full impact of lingering out of time. It was fine when she and the Doctor were just passing through. They could spin any old story. Events unfolded so fast and people were so scared that their explanations generally went unchallenged. Initial suspicion of why these strangers and trespassers were even on the asteroid/island/cable car in the Pyrenees faded fast once they realised the Doctor was going to save their skins.

But they weren’t saving anybody’s skins, here. They weren’t passing through. They were attempting to fly under the radar and so far, they weren’t doing a terribly good job of it. 

When Amy was fully dressed she stepped out of the bedroom. Her mouth opened to call for the Doctor just as hand clapped firmly over it. A long, thin arm pinned hers to her sides. Amy’s exclamation of surprise was easily muffled beneath the Doctor’s hand. It was definitely him – she would know that body anywhere. And right now it was flush against hers so firmly that she could feel both hearts beating.

“Mmph!”

“Quietly,” he whispered in her ear. His hand fell away from her mouth. “We have visitors..”

Amy’s eyes darted around the room. It looked the same as ever, dressed in morning shadows. “Who?”

“Old friends of mine,” he explained, his voice roughened around the edges. “The Vashta Nerada. Piranhas of the air. Thousands and thousands of tiny sharp pointy teeth, all swarming together in the dark.”

“But it isn’t dark,” Amy whispered back. She was scouring the room with her eyes but nothing that looked remotely like an airborne piranha was making itself known, especially not numbered in the thousands. “And I can’t see anything.”

“Watch the shadows.”

“I can’t see anything there, either,” she responded a trifle impatiently.

“They’re confined to the dark. They live in shadow. They attach themselves to people’s shadows … I’ve seen it happen. They attached their fangs to shadows and ate them all up from the inside out.”

“Ate who up?”

“People in the spacesuits.”

“What people in the spacesuits where?”

“In the library.”

“ _Why._ ”

“Their library, wasn’t it?” He sniffed loudly. “If ever there was a reason not to pulp forests – “

“ _Okay_ , so what do we do?”

“ _You_ are going to sit tight right here.”

The Doctor dragged her to a sunny spot on the carpet. He placed his hands on her shoulders and pushed down until she sat cross-legged, frowning up at him. 

“You’re going to count shadows and keep an eye on them, while I figure out just how many of them there are.”

So that was where Amy sat for the next ten minutes. None of the shadows appeared to be moving. She counted them all, and then counted again. Her attention began to wander. She began to watch the Doctor instead and soon he had her complete attention. It wasn’t hard to see something wasn’t right.

There was a lack of commitment. He jabbed his sonic at this shadow or that. The sonic’s frequency danced up and down the scale as he casually waved it around. Occasionally he raised it to eye level, but he wasn’t reading anything. It was like a badly choreographed dance called Going Through the Motions. Twice she noticed his attention wandering altogether. He stood scratching his neck and gazing with glazed eyes at the ceiling, and then he actually took a prism from his coat and fiddled with it in the light. Both times he jumped when he saw her watching and snapped back to work.

“All right, what’s going on?” Amy finally demanded. It had been thirty minutes or so since the pantomime began. “Don’t lie to me. I don’t believe for one second that you’re scanning miniature piranhas!”

He had the audacity to play hurt. “Pond, this room is infested – “

“No, it’s not.”

“The shadows are moving.” His gaze fixed on her, and for all the solemnity in his gaze he might have told her the world was about to end.

“Only because the sun is!” Had he completely lost the plot? Amy inched toward the nearest shadow.

“Amelia, I’m warning you, stay _out_ of there!”

“Or you’ll what, tell your imaginary piranha friends to get me?”

“They’ll pick your bones in a microsecond - !”

“Oh _come on!_ I’ve watched you solve things a thousand times. You’re not doing that now! You’re wasting time. And you’re bored! So what are you really doing?”

“The Vashta – Amy, stop!” 

Amy had lifted one leg in the air. Her toe was inching toward the shadow. “Oh no! I’m gonna get in shadow! Oh no they’re gonna eat up my toe…!”

“ _Amelia!_

He lunged for her. Amy slammed her foot down and exposed the lower half of her leg to shadow. She’d been mostly sure of herself but it was still a relief when she didn’t feel the meat on her bones disintegrate. The next second the Doctor grabbed her arms and jerked her out of the shadow. She could see this was simply reflex and the jig was up. He wasn’t going to pretend anymore.

“If you didn’t want me to go to the hospital, you could’ve just said so,” Amy said quietly.

He sighed. His forehead rested gently against hers. “Amy, I need you to promise me something.”

“Go on.”

“Please tell me you won’t lord this one over me for the next decade.”

“HA! No. Course not.” Beat. “The rest of your life though, definitely.”

He grinned. “I have a very long life.”

“I have a very long memory, and this is way too good to ever let either of us forget.”

They laughed. The Doctor groaned and pulled away. He flopped down on the sofa and massaged his temples.

“The psychic paper can’t fix this. It’s already in motion.” He lowered his hand. “You go back there Pond and I’m not sure they’ll just let you leave. I scrambled their network. They won’t be able to find us here.”

“Can’t go to work then.”

“No. But how about a little holiday, you and me?”

“…but the TARDIS. We’re waiting – “

“Oh I rigged that lamp there up ages ago with a beacon. When it detects the TARDIS it’ll signal the sonic. Can’t go too far of course, the signal strength’s not strong enough for that but – we can take a little trip though!” He jumped to his feet. “What do you say, hey? Geronimo?”

“Geronimo.”

Amy was grinning. The prospect of adventure after so much stagnation was looming before them, but there was a sick worry buried deep within her heart which soured the exhilaration. She had the feeling getting offworld right now might not be so easy.


	6. Is

This time it just wasn’t as simple as snapping fingers to pop open the TARDIS doors. The Doctor remembered, with deep yearning, the gentle hum with which he would be welcomed inside. It was more than a sound: it was sensation, an embrace. Sometimes she was cross and the hum reverberated unpleasantly between his hearts, but the acknowledgement of homecoming was always present. They were all that remained of their birthplace and bound together as only two orphans could be. Nobody understood the Doctor the way she did. He missed the psychic link. A spirit with whom lines would never be crossed, and everything was always clear and understood. Amy’s mind could not be penetrated, to do so would break it. And though she loved him the Doctor knew she did not comprehend the extent of his loneliness for the TARDIS. He could not fault her for that. 

Given no box could be summoned, arrangements largely fell to Amy. He was looking forward to finding out how well she’d gone. _Public transport_ was laughably alien. It would be fun! Imagine all the silly, wonderful people he would meet. Everyone probably slept together in a great big room and told stories. Maybe there’d be dancing, too.

Or perhaps not.

“Amy! I’m _back._ ” The Doctor swept his arm across the kitchen counter and knocked off the mess of cartons, wiring and bottle caps he’d been fiddling with the day before last. In its place, he set down his purchases.

Amy sauntered in from the bedroom. She was fully dressed. In one hand she carried a lightweight backpack and in the other a container of chocolate ripple ice cream. A spoon protruded from the icy mounds.

“I just couldn’t let it go to waste in there without us.” 

The Doctor relieved her of the ice cream and crammed a dollop of cold chocolate into his mouth. To his amusement, a flicker of resigned irritation passed across her features. Provoking Amy really was such fun.

“Soooo, what did you buy?” She pulled the first tube out of the bag and read the label. “Doc Hatton’s Formula Number Five Point Oh! What is this some kind of – “

“Skin tint,” the Doctor said. His tongue was way too cold. “Thought you might want to disguise yourself.”

“Yeah, but we were talking – wigs, dyes.”

“This is a dye. Tint.”

“I don’t … really know how I feel about dying my skin,” she replied dubiously, turning the tube around. “What, so I could be, Bondi-tan? Rio-tan?” She looked up. “Are you ever actually going to get me to Rio? The last six times – “

“One day! Yes! You could be tanned. Or _purple!_ The girl in the shop said indigo is all the rage right now.”

Decisively, Amy put it down. “I don’t think so. Aha, this is more like it! Colour crawlers. People were telling me about these, they make themselves ginger by cooking up the shade they like with them.”

“Yeah!” The Doctor snatched it from her and tossed it from hand to hand, grinning. “I’m going to go ginger. Big ginge, me. You, whatever you like.”

“No, you’ll look _ridiculous!_ ” Amy lamented, trying to catch the tube. He was still tossing it between his hands and out of her reach. “Can you just shave your head or something? Don’t go ginger, please, it’s too stupid and we’re supposed to be low-key. If I can’t be ginger, you can’t be!”

“I’d make a _great_ ginger!” He cried, affronted. The tube was now still but held up high, aloft, out of reach. 

“No. Seriously! No.”

“You’re no fun at all, Pond.” He lowered the tube and tossed it to her. “What colour are you going to go?”

She studied it up at close range. “Don’t know. Hmm. Something, normal, I guess.”

“No normal here. Tint and dyes are all the rage.” He gave a knowledgeable sniff. “Blue is especially fashionable.”

She looked past the thing in her hands and smirked. “Girl in the shop tell you that?”

“Yes. No! Powers of observation, Pond. Now hurry up.”

“How does it work?”

She unpacked it. There were a number of small tabs in different colours, chemical sachets, and sugar crystals. Amy thrust the Doctor away. “You – over there. You have a nasty habit of ignoring instructions and disaster isn’t coming _anywhere_ near my hair.” She touched it. “I’ve never dyed it before.”

“Yes yes, sentimentality later, choose something!” The Doctor turned, ostensibly to check the flat for anything he might want to take with them. But the truth was he happened to be the sentimental one. He didn’t want Amy’s red-gold hair fade to ordinary. The crawlers were non-permanent, and a simple concoction reversed the process, but he had always known her with this beautiful shade. He loved it. It was part of what made Amelia, Amelia.

“Okay, I’m ready!”

“Wait!” He ran back in, arms over his head. “I’m doing it too.”

“Not - !”

“Not ginger! I’ll just – there we are, with a bit of ...” he quickly threw together some chemicals, heedless off the instructions. 

“Wait! You forgot the sugar. It makes it palatable. It says. That word exactly.”

He shook some of the raw sugar over the top and then spun around to Amy. They were facing one another with their little blobby gloops of matter on the edge of plastic spoons. With an unspoken count to three, they licked their spoons clean. Laughing, they grabbed one another and ran to the bathroom. They jostled in front of it for space and shrieked with laughter and delight as the hair on their head, and eyebrows, began to change. He saw now why they were called colour crawlers – it looked like the colour was sliding down their locks, root to tip.

His went a very dark brown. No, black – it wasn’t what he intended but he supposed that was what you got sometimes when you didn’t read instructions. But he wasn’t too bothered. Amy’s transformation was much more interesting. The red gave way to a light, candy blue. 

Amy grabbed her hair and pulled it back from her face with a shriek. “I’m _blue!_ ”

“Yes! And I’m … basically the same as I was before.” The Doctor thrust his palm against his forehead and lifted his hair, exposing the scar that ran back into his hairline. His attention slipped as he noticed a mark on his jaw, and he bunched his lips sideways. His skin went taut, no, good, just a spot of chocolate, no Pore Burrowers from Danuba…

“Come on Narcissus,” Amy seized his arm and dragged him away. “We’re booked on the redeye.”

They couldn’t go too far or the Doctor’s sonic wouldn’t communicate with the sensor he’d left behind. Amy had selected somewhere on the other side of the planet. Kep-6 was large and they might’ve been able to lie low in the next hemisphere, but Amy had chosen to send them to one of the moons. They needed identification to travel and would depend on the psychic paper to provide it. It was safe, lukewarm adventure. The Doctor chose to remain positive and enjoy himself, if possible. It likely involved a delicate balance of scoffing and delighted hand-flaps.

They left Gypsum with their small packs and did not talk much. Amy, he noticed, kept glancing at herself in reflective surfaces. Sometimes she pulled locks of her hair around her fingers and smirked at them. He wished she had let him try ginger out. They took the tube to Megablock 2, which was allocated the shuttle bays in Quadrant Three.

It was packed with people. This seemed to bother Amy and she doggedly elbowed her way through the milling travellers. There were bored ones and excited ones and some clutching reusable coffee cups in determined death-grips, as though they expected it to be confiscated at any moment. Travelling _the slow way_ was inexplicably noisy. And humanity, for all its advances with interstellar travel and starscrapers and chocolate wazoos, still hadn’t managed to iron out the difficulties in departure lounges.

Amy knew what she was about. “Come _on!_ ” She crossly demanded, tugging at his elbow when he stopped to regard a rogue water fountain which had decided to spurt at anyone who so much as looked at it. He chuckled when Amy’s machinations ensured he dodged a splash in the face.

“Ha! Missed me.”

They joined a line but did not stay there long. He was aware of Amy looking at him, sizing him up, perhaps deciding that queuing up with the Doctor was a fast track to potentially getting them booted right out of the departure lounge. She fished out the psychic paper. She’d kept it with her since booking their travel. She flashed it now at people they passed. Her curiosity was not piqued by the expression on people’s faces as she cheated her way up the line. She was too focused on their target.

The man at the desk with his slick hair ( _he_ had an interesting colour, a sort of magenta with white stripes!) flicked his fingers at Amy. Oh dear, the Doctor thought, a tight grin spreading across his lips. You didn’t dismiss _Amelia_ with gestures or ssh her – he’d learned this himself the hard way.

“Back of the queue, Miss – “

“Yes, but only, we have priority.” Amy thrust the psychic paper straight into his face. She spoke pleasantly enough but the Doctor heard the rising impatience underpinning her words.

The clerk craned his head back to try and make sense of what Amy had pushed into his face. His eyes moved back and forth, slowly, so slowly – couldn’t people _read_ any more! Then he brightened and came to his feet.

“Yes of course, priority!” Beaming, the clerk let himself through the counter. A hologram, the Doctor knew it, he’d seen the whole thing fizzing around the edges. Never missed a trick, that was him! He cocked his head and reached into his jacket for his sonic. He was curious to know what was powering the holo, but a sharp jab to the ribs from Amy brought him back to the present.

The clerk, who called himself Sue, was holding out his hand for the Doctor to shake. Oh, lovely. He shook the man’s arm jauntily up and down. It was probably a good idea to find out what the paper had projected, actually…

“Congratulations to you both!” Sue extracted his hand from the Doctor’s and began escorting them to the docking bay. The people at the heads of the queues watched them go. Irritation at a clerk leaving his station while they endured none-too-patiently was written all over their faces. The Doctor smiled and waved apologetically at a few and received gestures in return that were illegal on some planets.

“… the first people to make use of the refitted suite, of course, but you both already know that. It’s every luxury will be at your disposal, and if there is a single thing you may require which we have not arranged then all you need to is press the bell, and we will make amends.”

“Excellent, I am sure that will not be necessary,” Amy answered in her loftiest voice. She shot the Doctor a wicked grin behind Sue’s back.

Sue passed the main docking point and took them to another. It was a little further along, smaller, and clearly for a different class of passenger. 

“Noa,” Sue greeted the uniformed man waiting for them. “This is Mr and Mrs Smith, our newlywed competition winners. No guesses for what suite to show them to!”

The two men laughed so neatly at Sue’s pretty joke that it took them a moment or two to realise their newlywed competition winners were struck dumb and staring.

“I’m sorry,” Amy asked in a high, polite voice, “what was that, hm?”

“Mr and Mrs – Smith, I did pronounce it right, did I not?”

“Mm-hm,” was Amy’s stilted reply. Beat. “Yeah. That’s how you say it all right. Isn’t it Doct – ah, John? John Smith, cos you are John Smith. And I am … married.”

“Yes!” The Doctor recovered sufficiently to leap into action. He laughed and gave Amy a huge clap on the back which almost sent her into Noa. “ _Married._ Ha! Who would’ve thought! Me! Her! Well I mean, _me_ , I am obviously the marrying type. Have to fight them off with a stick! _Big_ stick. It’s all the different faces.” He twirled his finger around his own face, then pointed out both his hearts and winked as if Noa and Sue would certainly understand. “But her,” he gave a great sniff, “no one would have her. Felt sorry for her. Pity wedding! OW!”

The pain in his foot was worth Amy returning to some semblance of normality. They said their goodbyes to Sue and followed Noa into the ship. It was a fine enough craft, but the Doctor was having a terrible time staying focused. He wanted to know what the dampeners were using for fuel and what the walls were made of, but most of his attention was settling on Amy again. Once she’d recovered from her shock she seemed okay about it. She pointed things out to him in a kind of excited, isn’t-this-new-and-swish-and-shiny kind of a way, and he realised his irritation with her was going up and up.

By the time they got to their suite it was all he could do to look at her. He didn’t investigate his feelings. He knew quite well what was going on and he didn’t _want_ to address it. And any minute now she was going to cotton on to the fact that it wasn’t all sunshine and sprinkles for him and then the trouble would really start. But he still had a few moments – 

“Okay so what’s your problem?” 

Maybe those moments disappeared between being shown their luxury suite and the door closing. 

“Nothing.” He worked up a smile and turned crisply. He adjusted his jacket and began to prowl the honeymoon suite. It comprised of a bedroom, sitting room, parlour, private pool and garden. The bathroom was appointed with a large round tub and the kitchenette had a macaroon machine which he started to program for want of something to do.

“Yeah so I’m not buying that.”

He could see her in his peripheral vision. She leaned against the doorframe with her arms crossed. 

“You were fine and now you’re not, and _husband_ , are we about to have some kind of newlywed tiff?”

She was trying for levity, he knew that, but it was not the right time.

“Don’t do that.”

“Don’t do what?”

“Amy, we’re not married.”

Her smile slipped. Yes. She’d thought with a little teasing she could bring him around, but he wasn’t having that today. 

“I know we’re not. It’s a joke. Come on.”

“It’s not a joke, they all think we’re married and we’re in the honeymoon suite.”

“…so? It’s nice. We’re supposed to be lying low right, you said! We wouldn’t even have to leave the room here.”

“There’s only one bed.”

“We’ve shared a bed before!” Exasperated, she rolled her eyes at him. “I’ll sleep on the sofa then, if you’re going to be like that about it.”

“Is this what you wanted?”

“What?”

“When you booked. When you went up to the counter.”

“Huh? That’s not how it works anyway. They see what they want to see, don’t they?”

“Most of the time. But I use it most of the time,” The Doctor was angry, and his gestures were clipped as he advanced on her. “And I can block my own mind waves from the paper. I _choose_ to let their expectations appear on it instead, but theoretically it could pick up on the brainwaves of anyone who can’t control their mind.”

“I’m not psychic!”

“You don’t _have_ to be. The booking system is automated. It certainly doesn’t have brainwaves. It didn’t invent this arrangement. You did this when you booked our flights with the paper from home.”

Colour rose to Amy’s cheeks. “I – thought – it would be a laugh! It _is_ a laugh!”

“I’m not laughing.”

“Yes I thought about it!” She was bright red now, and stumbling over her words as she tried to save face. “I thought, you know, honeymooners get suites, and I needed to - it wasn’t anything, it wasn’t wishful thinking, oh god I’d rather _die_ than be married to you!”

“Oh thanks very much.”

“Well don’t you act all so high and mighty! You’re the one who is so angry about it! I just think it’s a laugh!”

“ _And I said I’m not -_ ”

“Not laughing! Yeah! Heard you the first time. God you’re so boring!”

Boring was not a word that sat well with the Doctor. It was worse than being described as ‘nice.’ “Excuse me!?”

“You’re so boring! This could be fun! This could be the most fun we’ve had in months and your xenophobia - !”

“ _Xenophobia!_ Are you out of your mind, Amy, me?! Xenophobic!”

“Why else are you so insulted that people might think we’re married! It isn’t m’blue hair, it’s one heart, one lifetime – “

“Oh come on Amelia, how many humans have I travelled with – “

“Yeah! How many?!”

“ – and you think I could be xenophobic!”

“Yeah how many! How many! Like little pets!”

“That’s a lie!”

“You’re only mad because people think you’re married to a human and they think you’re human and there’s nothing worse than that, is there!”

“Where are you even getting this from!?”

“Why else would the _idea_ of being married to me put you in such a state?!”

The Doctor fell silent. He maintained eye contact with her for a moment longer, just a heartbeat, and slowly closed his eyes. He wasn’t angry anymore.

“Yeah,” Amy snapped. The energy behind his rage had flowed out of him and right into her. “Catch up with you later. See if you can get this stupid thing to give us a psychic separation.”

The psychic paper was thrown down at his feet. Amy flounced out in anger and he made no effort to stop her. What was the point? He couldn’t hope to explain it to her.


End file.
